This Movie Works Whether You Play It Backward or Forward

Creating palindromes, strings of words that make an identical statement when read backward or forward, is a challenge, but doing the same with film poses an even more complex set of difficulties. Paris-based graphic designer Yann Pineill’s palindromic short film, Symmetry, is impressive because it succeeds in presenting a mirrored narrative that progresses organically whether watched from the beginning, from the middle, or reversed from the end.

“I did a lot of research on symmetry, and since it’s a really vast concept that can literally be applied to everything, I wanted to talk about a lot of different things,” Pineill says. “It was only when I started to look into symmetry in movements, actions and time that I really pictured the whole thing as a palindrome.“

The whole film plays exactly the same way forward as it does if you plop it into a VCR and press the reverse button, sound and all. Making this work is a lot harder than it might seem — the music and sounds, directions of any movement, the general sequence of events and how they’re cut together — all have to have to be planned and arranged so that they make sense both times they’re seen, forward or backwards.

“I found various techniques to make the story and the acting to be perceived differently backwards,” Pineill says. “Editing was very tricky as well, because it had to work forwards as well as backwards, so it makes you think about storytelling and rhythm in a very different way as regular editing.”

Other less-obvious symmetries and reflections abound, such as a gradually shifting color palette, the fact that the main actors are a brother and sister, or visual dualities like the digital clock’s initial readout of 05:05 that’s seen again on the way back as 20:20. “On paper, the script would be rather normal and continuous, but I had to find ideas to express it with the same ‘raw matter’ — images and sounds — in the two halves,” he says.

Some of the symmetry is lopsided — the music just before half-way, for example, plays in reverse for a few seconds, a moment of surreality that resolves as soon as we cross the midpoint. The rest of the soundtrack was composed to remain musical when played in either direction.

“I listened to a lot of music backwards and forwards, and I started to figure what kind of sounds would be listenable backwards without being too obvious,” he says. “I think it’s more interesting to let the viewers notice all the symmetries by themselves.”

Symmetry was created as part of Pineill’s graduation project for his master’s degree. As a designer, he was not experienced as a director, shooting the movie on a borrowed camera and hoping his ideas for the film would hold together in the end. The final result got favorable reviews from his teachers, but he did encounter resistance from a particular professor while making it. “Every week I went to see him, and he would try to convince me to drop the film idea and do something more graphic design related.”

Parachutes is the design collective that Pineill started with three friends from college. Symmetry can be found there, along with several other well-conceived video and design projects. An impressive synthesis of well-executed visuals, big ideas and cleverness permeate throughout.

As for the specific inspirations behind Symmetry, Pineill says the topic was almost overwhelming in the possibilities it afforded. The principles of symmetry show up in physics, mathematics, theories of art and aesthetics. A primary inspiration was found in chemistry and chiral molecules, identically mirrored structures with different purposes.

“It’s a vast and very interesting concept,” says Pienill, “as it relies on balance, perfection, beauty … and of course all the opposites — asymmetry, disorder, diversity, chaos. No one can make a film long enough to explore the whole subject.”